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No heart in this romance

Vincent Franklin

Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle. Click for bigger pic!

Message in a Bottle, Luis Mandoki's unusual romance, based on Nicholas Sparks eponymous bestseller, falls into all the familiar traps: lovable single mother, angst-ridden hero pondering over love lost, stoic ageing father with zest for life, endless cutaways to boats and blue water.

In addition the obvious agenda to reinvent Kevin Costner as a brooding romantic hero -- since few bought tickets to Waterworld and The Postman, his recent vanity outings as a superhero -- overloads the film.

Message In A Bottle has a very interesting premise -- that of a woman enamoured of a man she has never met -- and it begins well. The opening panoramic shots of the sea and a boat adrift on the ocean suggests a breathtaking romance ahead. We first meet Theresa (Robin Wright Penn), a modern day damsel in distress (upwardly mobile single mother-cum-journalist) who is on vacation, while her son Jason visits his father.

Running along the deserted coastline of Cape Cod she stumbles on a bottle containing a letter addressed to a certain Catherine. This anonymous letter contains lamentations and remembrances of things lost in wake of her death. The raw, honest letter has a profound effect on Theresa, so much so that she decides to go in search of this troubled soul who tossed it in the ocean.

Robin Wright Penn in Message in a Bottle. Click for bigger pic!

The author is Garret Blake (Kevin Costner) a reclusive sailboat builder living in the seaside town of North Carolina. He lives in denial surrounded by the memorabilia of his deceased wife Catherine.

Theresa tracks him down and attempts to chase his blues away. Garret is, of course, resistant and prefers to build his dream boat instead.

Dodge (Paul Newman) Garret's father hopes that Theresa's love will wrestle his son away from his obsessive memories. In addition Garret also has Catherine's family on his back, who blame him for their daughter's untimely death and attempt to take possession of her paintings.

Sadly, the interesting story is waylaid by a rambling, uneven script (except for a few one liners allocated to minor parts) and Luis Mandoki 's (White Palace, When A Man Loves A Woman) laid-back, almost sluggish direction. The film is too long, occasionally tiresome and largely predictable, unrelieved even by the camerawork that offers spectacular touristic views of North Carolina.

The film aspires to be an old-fashioned paean to the heart-wrenching romances of yore (with modern twists and sensibility, of course), yet is lacking in adequate warmth or tenderness. It could have been a memorable meditation on life's losses. Or a cool, quite, allusive movie, rich in unforced metaphors and feelings.

Click for bigger pic!

Instead Mandoki steers the film through a superficial course. And tries to elicit our sympathy through the ineffective posturing of the leads without adequately setting up the narrative.

A truly memorable romantic pic essentially rides on the onscreen chemistry of its stars. Sadly there is no electricity, not even sparks between Costner and Robin Wright. The cool easygoing star with that lazy smile, Kevin Costner (Untouchables, JFK, No Way Out), is clearly out of his depth here.

He underplays the part of a wrecked soul to a fault totally lacking the haunted quality the character requires. (And you are never convinced that he could have written those evocative letters that form the epicentre the film.) He is in his element only in confrontational scene with John Savage (Salvador) set in the diner.

Robin Wright Penn (Princess Bride, State of Grace) makes an earnest effort to acquit herself but is unable to convey effectively the dilemma and torture of falling in love with a man who has shut himself out. You long for a hand to come out of the screen and drag you into the vortex of an emotional drama. But the leads remain bent upon leaving you uninvolved.

Paul Newman in Message in a Bottle. Click for bigger pic!

The burden of the film falls on the dependable, Paul Newman. He puts in a spirited, natural performance small in a peripheral role as the stoic weather beaten father of Kevin Costner.

Newman with his formidable screen presence, blue eyes, and arrogant smile personified male movie stardom in the yesteryear. Here his affable, stately grace and energy lights up the screen and bring much credibility to the father -son scenes and to the film itself.

During the mandatory father-son showdown in the end ("You choose -- the past or the future. Pick one and stick with it.") Newman conveys with a single look the tragedy of love, longing and demise that the principals struggle to depict during the entire movie.

In fact Newman (despite his age) seems a perfect candidate to play Costner 's role. This suggestion is of course preposterous since Costner is also the film's producer.

Billed as saga of love lost and found, this unengaging film is testimony of opportunity, to make a sentimental classic, found and lost.

The message, in a nutshell, is -- stay away from this empty bottle.